Italy election: A former comedian runs circles around a former EU commissioner

The Italian elections have delivered a shock result for the eurozone – and introduced fresh uncertainty, to both Italian politics and the future of the single currency. No party or coalition holds a governing majority in the Senate, the upper house of the Italian parliament, and there are no obvious coalitions in the offing. Italy has had plenty of unstable governments over the past few decades, but this situation, whereby it may not be possible to form a new government following an election, is actually new – making the next steps unusually uncertain.

Given this, several leading Italian politicians have over the last 24 hours said that new elections should be avoided – even Silvio Berlusconi said a snap vote wasn’t “desirable”. All eyes are now on President Giorgio Napolitano, who has the unenviable task of rounding up a new government. If you’re interested in all the wonkish intricacies of what happens next, see here.

Italians voted for and against all kinds of stuff – and it would be a major mistake to lump all the anti-austerity forces together in some sort of generic protest vote (Grillo and Berlusconi are very different animals). But if you sit in Brussels, there were two, unambiguous blows.

Second, the Five-Star Movement led by comedian Beppe Grillo received over 25 per cent of the vote. Mario Monti, the outgoing prime minister – who was put in place to lead a Brussels-friendly, pro-reform government – mustered less than 10o per cent of votes in both houses. Think about that for a second. In practical terms, this means that a party – Grillo's Five Star Movement, which has called for a referendum on whether the country should leave the single currency and whether Italy should default on some of its debt – will have roughly twice as many seats in Italy’s Lower House than the man hailed in Brussels and Berlin as Italy’s saviour . It also means that a former European Commissioner and adviser to Goldman Sachs just got completely hammered at the polls by a former comedian.

The Five Star Movement is likely to be studied as an example of innovative campaigning. It made much use of social media – recruiting its candidates primarily via YouTube, for example. The party is far more anti-establishment (and strongly anti-Berlusconi) than anti-Brussels. But still, though Italians remain staunchly pro-EU, this election is a major blow for the Brussels cash-for-austerity consensus.

The single currency remains a political project, and Beppe Grillo has reminded us, yet again, that politics remain local.